Back from FOSDEM 2017

For the third year some of us from Bitcraze visited Fosdem, the biggest open-source European conference. Like the other years we enjoyed being there a lot and we had a great time hanging-out with community members like Fred.

Fred presented a great lightning talk about the news in the Crazyflie galaxy, the video and slide are already available.

Arnaud talked about the Loco positioning system. The talk and the demo, went well. Unfortunately the video from the talk is not available yet, we will tweet it and add it to this post as soon as it is online.

The Loco Positioning talk was a great opportunity for us to test the most recent bleeding edge additions to the Crazyflie autonomous algorithms. We flew the new non-linear controller from Mike Hammer using trajectory generation from Marcus Greiff. The non linear controller uses setpoints not only of position but also of velocity and acceleration to control the Crazyflie. This is where trajectory generation is useful: if you can generate a trajectory and calculate position, velocity and acceleration over time, you can feed all this information to the controller and the controller will be able to do a much better job following your trajectory. This enabled us to fly the Crazyflie fairly aggressively the week before the FOSDEM talk:

In this video the Crazyflie is accelerating to about 2g continuously to keep the trajectory. We were a bit concerned to fly such aggressive maneuvers in public without more testing so we designed a slightly safer demo the night before the talk in our hotel room:

This trajectory was successfully flown in the demo and shows the performance of this new controller. There has been a lot happening with the Crazyflie control algorithms lately: Marcus, Mike and Wolfgang have all made new controllers and Marcus has developed an on-board trajectory generator. There is still some work required in the firmware architecture to merge these into Master, but we hope this can be done in the coming weeks. Follow the Crazyflie firmware commits and github tickets if you are interested in the progress.